I don't think this is theatre - I think he means it...

PSFK - the future of retail report

PSFK presents Future of Retail report

I confess I haven't read it in detail yet - but on a quick glance - this looked very interesting - PSFK is becoming a must have resouce....

PSFK on planning and intuitive problem solving....

Nice little clip...interesting the weight everyone in the clip puts on what I would call emotional intelligence

Active brand immunity

I was sitting having some nice Sushi in a St Petersburg restaurant on Wednesday – and a good friend and business colleague mentioned a time with his young daughter on the Berlin underground.

He said she had sat down, looked at the ads facing her in the carriage and pointed out to her father “they’re only smiling at us to make us buy things”.

His daughter has acquired what we might call “active brand immunity”. Until the early 1960s, brand immunity simply didn’t exist. 3 TV ads a week gave the typical US brand 90% market penetration. Resistance was futile. Without an alternative narrative – the consumer bought, pretty much, what they were told.

Slowly over the course of the next 20 years, some consumers developed a degree of what we might call “passive brand immunity”, usually off the back of a high profile failure - Nestles’ child baby milk scandal, Exxon’s Spill, The “tooth in a coke can” meme, literature (Silent Spring) etc. They learned to shop selectively. Weeding out the most obviously exploitative, dumb brands but only on an ad hoc basis.

Now it seems, it might be possible that children as young as 8 can acquire ABI – “active brand immunity”. An innate, unconscious rejection of brand messaging as a default - driven by widely available counter information on digital networks about brands, rising social and environmental concerns surrounding their activity and a more general cynicism about the motives of the corporate world (bought on by a seemingly unending supply of disasters and scandals). Bottom line - kids are so informed of the real nature and true activity of brands, that taken as a whole, their potency is reduced.

My strong sense at the coal face of marketing is the idea of brand - certainly the way we understood the concept at the end of the 20th century at any rate - appears to be fading. The concept of commodity clubs – those institutions who are  adding something of real value to a customers world is beginning to take root. If  brands are morphing into institutions which more accurately reflect the desires and demands of their consumer, then that certainly on balance, can only be a good thing.

BP Oil Spill.....

Germany wins Eurovision.....

Quelle surprise!

The only net exporter in the Union. The only country able to bail the rest of us out.

And they win Eurovision.

Who would have thought it. What a coincidence.

How come we came last though? Are we being punished for being able to devalue?

A weekly round up...

I bookmark a lot - for clients, tracking memes and to develop my strategy process - makes wading through my delicious tags pretty painful - so from now on, on a regular basis, I thought I'd pull out the highlights from my wanderings around the web...

The modern business plan by Seth (Godin) – here

Mastercard getting into data web marketing, API’s and the semantic web - here

Facebook’s approach to the semantic web - here

The cost of being rich - here

An alternative metro – has had lots of press this – quite amazing - here

A great round up of 3d printing - here

Cos in our new house – I want to make sure our new woodburner heats the house as well - here

Site dedicated to the need for brands to become publishers - here

My own take on developing a content strategy - here